Jack Bond, the British filmmaker who worked with Jane Arden on the avant-garde films of the 1960s and 70s, continues to collaborate and with Pet Shop Boys and Adam Ant, died aged 87. Bond’s family told the Guardian that he died on 21 December at a nursing home in Twickenham.
Children’s Pet Shop, with whom he collaborated in the 1980s; it is said in the announcement: “[Jack] He was a warm and funny man who we very much enjoyed working with and send our love and condolences to his family and loved ones.”
The band’s varied career began with his partnership with Arden, whom he had met in the early 1960s. Bond had served as an apprentice at the BBC, and made his mark with a documentary about Wilfred Owen, The Pity of War, in 1964. In 1965, he and Arden Dalí in New York, a film about the artist was released. the following year.
Bond described Arden, now an actor and writer, as “the most beautiful and wonderful woman” and he was happy to follow her as she led him to the extreme ideas of the time. In 1968 the band directed The Separation, a breakup, an experimental story written by Arden about a woman in a failing marriage harassed by her lover, with the sound of Procol Harum. The couple then worked on the other side of the underground, produced by Arden and the band, from Arden’s 1971 novel A New Fellowship for Freaks, Prophets and Wise Men for their theater company Holocaust, a dark, disturbing film from the 70s anti-mountains. – emotional psychiatry; The girl’s schizophrenia was investigated and reputedly involves a lot of drug-taking in the setting. The couple were then credited as co-directors for the sci-fi fantasy drama Anti-Clock, which starred Sebastian Savile, Arden’s son from her marriage to TV director Philip Savile, and which opened at the London Film Festival in 1979.
However, after Arden killed himself in 1982, Bond refused to show the members who paid tribute to Arden in 1983, later saying: “I consciously suppressed them with a lot of thought and emotion.” They remained almost entirely unheard of for a quarter of a century, until they were restored and released on the BFI Flipside label in 2009.
Bond returned to TV in the early 80s, producing and directing numerous episodes of the show South Bank, including Werner Herzog, Patricia Highsmith and the Dutch Dans Theatre. One particular thing about Roald Dahl Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe from Pet Shop Boyswho were looking for a director to make long-form film collages of songs. Link then described the film, This Couldn’t Happen Here, as a “traitor of the sea postcard come to life and gone mad”. It did poorly at the box office when it was released in 1988, but an excerpt from the film was made into a video for Pet Shop Boys in 1987 will always be a hit in my heart. They also promoted a bond for the The heart of the band is oneIan McKellen as a vampire in a Slovenian castle.
In 2013 Bond returned to cinemas with Blueblack HussarAnnals of Adam Ant’s documentary about the musician’s return to music after a mental health crisis. He continued in 2018 with Artist Eyesof the painter Chris- Moon.
Bond is survived by his wife Moira, whom he married in 1984 and from whom he is separated, three children, Tom, Kate and Oliver Bond. (The fourth child, Rebecca, died in 2018.) In 1999 he met his partner Mary-Rose Storey, who was working on the film Hussar and in the eyes of the artists Blueblack. He survived him together with his daughter Lily Marten von Kalbach.